>>REVIEW
RENT
STARRING Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal and Rosario Dawson
DIRECTED BY Chris Columbus
Opens Friday, November 25
Check listings
How do you measure a year in the life? With artists, with dancers, with writers, with deadbeat singers. With addicts, with drag queens, with queer girls, with grave diseases.
How about love?
Rent is the film version of the wildly popular stage musical, which follows a group of New York City bohemians from Christmas Eve, 1989, to the same day a year later. The central character, Mark (Anthony Rapp), is an aspiring documentarian who films the three unconventional couples who comprise his surrogate family. His songwriter roommate, Roger (Adam Pascal), is HIV-positive and despondent, cheered only by Mimi (Rosario Dawson), the junkie/stripper who lives downstairs. Mark’s friend Collins (Jesse L. Martin) falls in love with upbeat drag queen Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), and together they cope with their HIV-positive status. Mark’s performance artist ex, Maureen (Idina Menzel), is involved in a tempestuous relationship with lawyer Joanne (Tracie Thoms). Mark and Roger are threatened with eviction by their landlord Benny (Taye Diggs), a former roommate and friend who married wealth and "lost his principles."
Director Chris Columbus recruited six of the eight actors who played principal roles in the original 1996 Broadway cast (only Dawson and Thoms are newcomers), and it’s always a treat to watch talented theatre actors do their thing on screen.
When Rent first opened off-Broadway, it was lauded as an exuberant, relevant piece of theatre, and it remains an earnest depiction of a time when HIV/AIDS was little understood or even acknowledged. Yet the film version of Rent is more period piece than risqué social commentary, recalling an era of lesbian chic and slackerdom, when "alternative" meant authentic, and angst was sexier than talent.
I blame the genre. Rent is somehow too operatic (Jonathan Larson literally based his play on Puccini’s La Boheme), for the cinema. Its stylized dialogue, contrived plot points and essential melodrama, all points that make it work so well when imaginatively staged, are simply intrusive on screen, and Chris Columbus’s cluttered sets, music video cuts and closeups don’t help matters. To his credit, there’s a lovely cinematic moment in the opening number where he pans down the row of singing actors, capturing their voices one by one. But there is also the over-eager "La Vie Boheme" or the awkward "Light My Candle."
Who should see Rent? I honestly don’t know. Musical-haters will hate it, and everyone else, even the most fervent fans, will probably find it wanting. |
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